Susanne's Comments

Susanne:

It is undeniable that today millions of people use computers as aids to their thinking. In the digital age, computers are an essential and intertwined supplement to our thoughts and our memories. Discussing Licklider’s prophesy from half a century ago, legal scholar Tim Wu notes that virtually every computer “program we use is a type of thinking aid—whether the task is to remember things (an address book), to organize prose (a word processor), or to keep track of friends (social network software).” These technologies have become not just aids to thought but also part of the thinking process itself. In the past, we invented paper and books, and then sound and video recordings to preserve knowledge and make it easier for us as individuals and societies to remember information. Digital technologies have made remembering even easier, by providing cheap storage, inexpensive retrieval, and global reach. Consider the Kindle, a cheap electronic reader that can hold 1,100 books, or even cheaper external hard drives that can hold hundreds of hours of high-definition video in a box the size of a paperback novel.

Susanne:

"California has about $13 billion toward the total needed to build the network, including $3.3 billion in federal stimulus funding awarded before Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2011. California voters approved a $9.95 billion bond measure in 2008 to help finance the line. Portions of it already are under construction.

The Federal Railroad Administration stipulates that any project on U.S. soil receiving federal funding must use equipment made in this country, with parts also fabricated here. Overseas manufacturers would have to build or expand U.S. facilities to do the work, and California officials say they will give preference to companies willing to build in the state."
We need to build this in America with American and not foreign companies. Build America, not buy America.

Susanne:

The US Transportation Department is weighing tougher safety regulations for rail shipments of crude, which can ignite and result in huge fireballs.

Responding to a series of fiery train crashes, including one this spring in Lynchburg, Virginia, in July the government proposed rules that would phase out tens of thousands of older tank cars that carry increasing quantities of crude oil and other highly flammable liquids.

Susanne:

Susanne:

Indeed, Stewart’s eclectic taste often provided a boost to titles that wouldn’t ordinarily receive a lot of media attention. For instance, after his interview with David Mitchell, who translated Naoki Higashida’s memoir from the Japanese, sales of “The Reason I Jump” exploded, and the book became a major bestseller, according to Sally Marvin, director of publicity at Random House, Spiegel & Grau and the Dial Press. She calls Stewart’s decision “a huge loss.”

Publishers love to sell more books, of course, but Paul Bogaards, executive vice president of Knopf Doubleday, notes that Stewart’s influence has been more significant than the raw sales numbers suggest. “Publishers don’t have a lot of substantive broadcast booking options for authors,” he says. “The value of Jon Stewart welcoming writers on his show, giving them a platform and making them a part of the conversational mix was quantifiable in this sense: He elevated the work of authors, made books relevant to a younger demographic. And that demographic remains challenging for publishers to reach, at least en masse.”

Susanne:

Sacrificing everything for the false god called “The Economy” and adhering to the dogma of perpetual, unregulated growth undermines not just the health of our planet but everything we value as human beings. Action doesn’t have to mean simply doing without; Klein points out that we’ve been doing an awful lot of that lately anyway, ostensibly to boost The Economy (capitals mine) with various austerity measures. Among many other things, action can mean the re-empowerment of individuals and local communities, enrichment of our daily lives as we prioritize sustainability and human connections, and a shift in values away from the never-ending pursuit of profit back toward the things that really matter in life.

Like me, you may feel a resistance to adding “concern about climate change” to your to-do list. After all, there’s countless “issues” we “should” care about, right? World hunger, injustice, racism, homelessness, the list goes on. Who has the time? Who has the energy? The good – and terrible – thing is, all of these things are related, and they all come to a head in climate change. To quote Klein once more:

“…underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change isn’t an ‘issue’ to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message — spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions — telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.”

Susanne:

Susanne:

"However, Rankin is most astute at making connections between the post-war Bond novels and Fleming's experience in Naval Intelligence. If the war made Fleming feel fulfilled as a man it also provided him with a vast store of memories that consciously or unconsciously fed into the plots, characters and situations of the novels themselves. "M" in the novels is a portrait of Fleming's old NID boss Admiral Godfrey. The "Lektor" machine in From Russia with Love is clearly modelled on the Enigma encryptors. An old 30AU member, Tony Hugill, became a minor character under his own name in The Man with the Golden Gun, and so on. Most telling of all is the late story Octopussy that Rankin very cleverly shows can be interpreted as a deliberate self-portrait of the author as embittered, self-loathing drunk, "living off the capital of his war". For Fleming, one feels, nothing ever matched the intensity and excitement of his life between 1939-45 and all his worldly success after it could not drive away his demons."

Susanne:

‘Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one imagines,” Alan Turing says to Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game. This is the appeal of the Bletchley Park war. It’s a particularly British story, whose eccentric heroes are more likely to be found solving crossword puzzles than flying aeroplanes. They can sometimes be observed throwing cups of tea into the lake or stuffing their pipes with sandwiches instead of tobacco. And it is especially satisfying to think of this gaggle of dishevelled boffins defeating the disciplined pomposity of nazism. They were certainly not the kind of men to be given much shrift by Hitler.

But supporting the tweedy heroes was a cast of less unusual people, many of them women. Although there were just 186 staff at Bletchley in August 1939, by 1942 there were 1,600 and by the end of 1944 this had risen to 8,743. Three-quarters of them were women, made available by the introduction of female conscription in 1941. Their stories have been neglected, largely because the exploits of the leading Bletchley code-breakers are more exciting. The women who have found their way into the histories have tended to be the handful of female cryptanalysts. Joan Clarke has now been given spirited if pouting form by Keira Knightley.

Two books have appeared to remedy this situation. Tessa Dunlop’s The Bletchley Girls tells the story of 15 female veterans of “Station X”, all of whom Dunlop has interviewed at length. We get to know them before the war, follow them to Bletchley and then see its effects on their later lives. Michael Smith’s The Debs of Bletchley Park is a more comprehensive but also more inchoate account of a cross-section of women at Bletchley, including Clarke and other codebreakers alongside their humbler counterparts.

Most of the women were young, and excited to leave home to play their part in the war effort, hoping to collide with danger and with valorous heroes. They were disappointed by the men. “There were no men at Bletchley at all,” Lady Jean Graham decrees to Dunlop; “they were awful types, I thought”. Lady Jean’s years as a debutante and her engagement to a dead commando make her unusually dismissive. Others found the self-deprecating charm of the Oxbridge academics more appealing. The decoder Gwen Davies had been informed by a guard when she arrived at the park that she had entered “the biggest lunatic asylum in Britain”. The description proved accurate but she fell in love with one of the lunatics nonetheless, acquiescing when the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins announced while walking along a blacked out street: “You know we have to get married?” The 19-year-old Rozanne Medhurst struck up an unlikely romantic friendship with Hugh Last, a professor of ancient history who was determined to teach her Latin before the war was over.

Susanne:

A sequel to late Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s bestselling Millennium crime trilogy will go on sale in at least 35 countries from August, the book’s publishers said on Tuesday.

That Which Does Not Kill was completed in November by David Lagercrantz, known for co-authoring Swedish football star Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s autobiography. He stands in for Larsson, who died of a heart attack in 2004 aged 50.

Susanne:

"The internet is not the answer. But who said it was? And hang on, what was the question again? The internet is a good answer to a question like “What do we call the global network of computer networks?”, but a bad response to “What would you like to drink?” The internet is a very good answer, in the sense of “approach or solution”, to the problem of sending a written message very quickly to someone on the other side of the world, but a poor one to the problem of constructing a better society."

Susanne:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is expected to open the Atlantic Ocean to oil drilling on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the planning and a draft map viewed by McClatchy.

The proposal appears to allow drilling in areas off Virginia and the Carolinas, while excluding Florida, Maryland and Delaware. The Interior Department is expected to release final details of the plan Tuesday afternoon.

It would mark the first time in decades that oil drilling is allowed off the East Coast, and is sure to be highly controversial. The decision does not require Congressional approval but Charles Ebinger, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution, said he expects court battles and environmental groups file lawsuits over the plan.

"It will be a battle royale," Ebinber said.

The oil and gas industry will also have reason to complain. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the plan is going to exclude drilling in parts of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off the Arctic coast of Alaska.

The oil industry has pushed hard to open the Atlantic Ocean to drilling, but it’s not clear how much oil and gas is out there.

Susanne:

Crews worked on Monday to clean up crude oil that spilled in and near the Yellowstone River in eastern Montana while officials with Bridger Pipeline LLC tried to determine what caused the weekend breach.

Bridger has said the break in the 12in steel pipe happened on Saturday morning in an area about 9 miles upstream from Glendive. Bridger’s spokesman, Bill Salvin, said on Monday that the company is confident that no more than 1,200 barrels – or 50,000 gallons – of oil spilled during the hour-long breach.
[The pipeline is 8 ft. below the river....8 ft!!!!!]

Susanne:

With Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell promising an open debate on the Keystone XL pipeline bill, Senator Bernie Sanders, the maverick Independent from Vermont, has crafted a beauty of an amendment. He plans to offer a “sense of Congress” resolution in the debate asking each senator if he or she agrees with “the opinion of virtually the entire worldwide scientific community” that climate change is a factually proven problem resulting in “devastating problems in the United States and around the world.”

Susanne:

"So the big question is: Are we in fact weakening our overall ability to fight viruses by getting too many vaccines? While this question can apply to any vaccine, it's particularly pertinent with regards to influenza vaccine, which public health officials say we must get each and every year from the age of six months throughout our lives until death. An even larger question, and one which researchers looking at epigenetics have only just begun to scratch the surface of, is whether or not universal use of vaccines can have a generational effect.

One 2013 study18,19 suggests that this may indeed be the case. The study found that infants born to mothers who received the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine lose natural, passively acquired immunity from their mothers sooner than those born to mothers who'd been naturally infected with measles. The reason for this is because vaccinated mothers tend to have lower concentration of measles-specific antibodies. Another study20 published in the same issue of the same journal found that, on average, the duration of passive protection against measles was two months longer for infants born to unvaccinated mothers.

Sadly, the authors use these alarming facts to support recommendations to get infants vaccinated sooner, rather than address the elephant in the room, which is whether or not one-size-fits-all mandatory vaccination policies have seriously compromised natural immunity over the past 50 years and will further compromise it for generations to come? Most of the childhood diseases for which children are vaccianted today are not deadly for the vast majority of children. Moreover, why are we trading a more robust and longer lasting natural immunity for an artificial more temporary vaccine acquired immunity?"

Susanne:

Two realities trading places, the threat of violence in an uneasy state of play: classic Murakami, of course. But also vintage Chip Kidd, the associate art director at Knopf who has been designing U.S. first editions of Murakami books since the author’s 1993 short-story collection, “The Elephant Vanishes.”

Kidd’s designs contain eyes and other facial features, circular motifs that seem to swirl through kinetic colors, and bold, arresting closeups. In a display case in his Upper East Side apartment, Kidd devotes a shelf to his “Murakami face trilogy”—the covers of the author’s three longest novels, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” “Kafka on the Shore,” and “1Q84,” boasting, in order, a painted mechanical bird’s eye, a head that looks like an inflated golf ball, and a photograph of a young woman’s face, parts of which are strategically concealed behind the book’s title and dust jacket.

Susanne:

"We want to keep the Internet open and free. Don't let cable companies take away our ability to create and express ourselves on the world wide web. Support real net neutrality, not fake bills like "Title X" that will poison the Internet."

Susanne:

Susanne:

f Stonyfield can do it, so can the other Big Three Organic Dairies.

On December 5 (2014), Stonyfield Farm resigned from the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA), a trade group that is suing Vermont to overturn the state’s GMO labeling law, passed earlier this year.

The resignation came about five months after OCA and a number of our allies sent an open letter to four leading organic dairy companies—Stonyfield, Organic Valley, White Wave/Horizon Organic and Aurora Organic Dairy—demanding they withdraw their membership in the IDFA.